How to Pair Weed Terpenes with Your Munchies

Weed may give you the munchies, but if you plan it right you can pair those munchies with your strain of cannabis. Of course you’ve heard of wine and food pairings, but what about weed and food pairings? The question is what to base these pairings on.

Like all other plants, cannabis is filled with terpenes or aromatic chemicals. You can base different food pairings on the flavor of the weed you’re smoking.

Some of the most basic cannabis terpenes included limonene, which smells lemony, pinene, which smells like pine, and myrcene, which smells tropical. You’ll want the flavor profile of your weed to match the flavor profile of your munchies.

For instance, if you’re smoking a strain like Lemon Super Haze, you may want to pair it with something like lemon meringue pie or a lemony salmon dish. Or if you’re smoking something earthy like Girl Scout Cookies, you may want to balance it out with umami flavors like meat or mushrooms. Meanwhile, a strain like Agent Orange, named for its citrusy flavor, could go well with Chinese orange chicken or even a citrusy beer.

If you’re going to pair weed and food, you’ll want to either smoke the flower or better yet vaporize it so you can get the most out of the flavor. Unlike burning the flower, vaporizing helps bring out the flavors without the combustion.

There isn’t a wrong way to pair cannabis and food — it’s just a matter of knowing your own palette and matching your options accordingly. However, you’ll also come to appreciate the pairings more as your taste for cannabis becomes more refined. New smokers may have a hard time picking up on different terpenes in the plant, but the more strains you smoke and the more you familiarize yourself, the more fun you’ll have with the pairings — whether you get high and go to a nice restaurant, order munchies off Seamless or Grubhub, or make your own at home. To learn more about different strains’ flavors, peruse a weed encyclopedia like Leafly, which will show you not only what a strain might taste like, but also how it may affect you.